The Construction of^Mule'in Indian Temple Architecture control of India through the knowledge of its land, its material artefacts, and its conceptual categories, that continues to offer analytical tools as well as modes to envision India's past. Curiously, when the term Vesara was first used, it was not associated with any existing monument. The term may have found its way into Ram Raz's influential Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus (published for the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1834), as this earliest study of south Indian architecture correlated living architectural practice and existing monuments with fragments of Sanskrit texts.T Thereafter, Vesara is not mentioned until about the 1920s. The intervening decades are precisely when Indian stone temples were systematically documented, and the first narrative of the history of Indian temple architecture based on that documentation was created. Monuments from Karnataka were made known to modern scholarship by the freelancing Scotsman, James Fergusson, who drew attention to them in the final chapter of his monumental History of Indian and Eastern Architecture (1866) .2 Not Vesara but Chalukyan was the name that gripped Fergusson's imagination. As one of a handful of names of an Indian dynasty to be first known, Chalukyan had already stirred interest in the circle of British orientalists in 1836.3 For Fergusson, Chalukyan not only referred to a dynasty but to a whole group of people, distinguished racially and linguistically from the two currently known, primary races constituting the population of India, namely the Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian. In his History, Fergusson made Chalukyan equal to those two, and defined a triad of fundamental styles of temple architecture. First published in 1866, Fergusson's study of Indian architecture was part of a multi-volume History of Architecture of All Countries. It was revised and separately published in 1876, and finally expanded in 1910 by his protege, the archaeologist James Burgess. In three ways, this study is a vivid expression of an imperialist discourse of the time. Firstly, using archaeology, it gives a systematic material base to earlier ethnographic knowledge of India's population as well as to the knowledge of India's history and culture, already initiated through Indological translations of Sanskrit texts and ancient inscriptions.4 Secondly, it attempts to portray in architectural history a concrete analogy for some basic characteristics of the 'natives' of India, for which Fergusson borrows the theory of 'race', the ethnocentric linking-and-ordering principle used for world population in a period of European expansion. Thirdly, within the global scope of the architecture of 'All Countries', it controls the merits and demerits of India's architecture through chronology: a presumed 'internal' system of time linking monuments to each other as well as to their collective destiny, which the objective scientist merely appears to be recording. For Fergusson, the Indian world was divided into three races inhabiting India's broadly construed, independent, regions, 'who have never amalgamated so as to become one people' but remained what he called several 'nationalities.'5 'Style' became a visual equivalent of these 'races', unifying the regions internally and distinguishing them physically as well as psychologically from each other. Fergusson's triad of architectural Journal of Arts & Ideas